impermanence

Shinzen Young reframes the traditional Buddhist concept of impermanence as "flow". I think this is starting to make sense to me.

I notice one of the things I like about music is that it moves. There is a beat, a drive, a sense of progress, a sense of aliveness. Some songs and genres lean hard into rhythm and beat, others into melody, or lyrics, and some are more dynamic than others, but listening to the right music in the right mindset can help me feel that sense of motion, which is necessarily a sense felt in the present moment.

So impermanence is not just about what I can't have. It doesn't mean just that there will never be real certainty or stability, and no good thing lasts forever, not even me. Those things are true, but depressing, so not very compelling to focus on. The framing as flow seems like better "marketing", a much more inviting view of the same facts.

The beautiful thing is to note that the sense of motion and aliveness that music evokes is always there to be evoked. There is always a progression of experience from moment to moment; nothing can ever be stuck. Internalizing this deeply seems like it ought to be an antidote to fixation.